[% setvar title The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20030921 %]
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<a name='The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20030921'></a><h1>The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20030921</h1>
<p>Deadlines, I love the sound they make as they fly past.</p>
<p>Those of you who receive this summary via mail may have noticed that
this summary is a little late, with any luck it will make up for its
tardiness by being inaccurate and badly written as well.</p>
<p>I'm going to reinstitute the tradition of starting with the internals
list this week, so without further ado:</p>
<a name='Pondering argument passing'></a><h2>Pondering argument passing</h2>
<p>Steve Fink pondered passing parameters properly, with a prototyped
Perl 6 example. Perl 5 certainly, and Perl 6 possibly, allow you to
ignore any function prototype by calling the function like
<code>&amp;f(1,2)</code>. Steve had concerns about what to do in the presence of
'splatted' argument lists. (Consider</p>
<pre>    sub foo(@a, $b) {...}

    @generated_arglist = ([1,2,3], 2);</pre>
<p>Calling <code>foo(@generated_arglist)</code> will throw an error, because the
function is expecting an array followed by a scalar. However, you can
get around that by using the <code>*</code> (splat) operator, which tells Perl
to wait until runtime and then treat @generated_arglist as if it were
a list of arguments to the function, and check its contents against
foo's parameter list. In Perl 5, if you had a prototyped function
<code>sub foo(@$) {...}</code> you would work around the problem by calling it
as <code>&amp;foo(@generated_arglist)</code>, but I have digressed a long way
already.)</p>
<p>I'm not entirely sure I got what this thread was about. I've just had
a chat with Dan about it on IRC, and I think I'm a little wiser, but
the thread that arose from Steve's post gave me the impression of
people talking past each other a little.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20030915020357.GA12796@foxglove' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Feature Freeze for 0.0.11'></a><h2>Feature Freeze for 0.0.11</h2>
<p>Steve Fink announced that Parrot was feature frozen in the wee small
hours of Monday morning (at least it was Monday morning if you live
in GMT; it was still Sunday if you're in Steve's timezone). Everyone
set about tidying things up, nailing bugs and generally getting
Parrot's house in order for a public release.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20030915034714.GA13768@foxglove' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Some Parrot people are disgustingly young'></a><h2>Some Parrot people are disgustingly young</h2>
<p>In a move calculated to annoy your summarizer, Dan Sugalski pointed
out that Piers is now twice the age of Brent Dax. I thought it was
bad enough back when I was working with Leon Brocard, who is also
disgustingly young, but at least he was old enough to drink beer and
vote. (It's very important that you do the former before the latter
apparently)</p>
<a name='Parrot musical chairs'></a><h2>Parrot musical chairs</h2>
<p>Some time after the next Parrot release everything's going to get
moved around in the parrot directory tree so things make a little more
sense. Dan laid out his vision. Leo liked it. Looks like it'll be
happening.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.LNX.4.44.0309150956370.3341-100000@redcap.sidhe.org' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Sorting out dependencies'></a><h2>Sorting out dependencies</h2>
<p>Andy Dougherty has been shaking the parrot tree with different
versions of Perl and found some incompatibilities between the jako
and perl6 languages and Perl 5.005. A few patches and skipped tests
solved that.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.SOL.4.53.0309151151070.27327@maxwell.phys.lafayette.edu' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Attaching Debuggers'></a><h2>Attaching Debuggers</h2>
<p>Nicholas Clark passed on the concerns of a nameless interlocutor who
had expressed a desire for a Perl debugger which could attach itself
to a troubled running process. This is, after all, something that gdb
can already do for C programs. Dan punted on details, but thinks it
should be possible to implement. It's definitely post 0.0.11
though. Michal Wallace pointed out that Python is very 'hooky' and
supports this.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20030919202225.Q4286@plum.flirble.org' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Various fixes'></a><h2>Various fixes</h2>
<p>Because most of the week was spent under a feature freeze, the vast
majority of this week's threads have been the kind of short lived
&quot;Patch! Applied!&quot; bugfix threads. Suffice to say, lots of bugs and
niggles got stamped on by the usual heroes plus a few more heroes for
good measure.</p>
<a name='Parrot 0.0.11 &quot;Doubloon&quot; Released'></a><h2>Parrot 0.0.11 &quot;Doubloon&quot; Released</h2>
<p>Parrot 0.0.11 got released on Saturday, narrowly missing &quot;International Talk
Like a Pirate Day&quot;. It was almost immediately superceded by version
0.0.11.1 which fixed a slight oversight and introduced a new
bug. Breaking my 'midnight GMT cutoff' rule, the latest version,
released is actually 0.0.11.2, which deals with the fact that Parrot
isn't set up to handle 4 part version numbers.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20030920075908.GO19481@foxglove' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<p><a href='http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/SF/SFINK/parrot-0.0.11.2.tar.gz' target='_blank'>www.cpan.org</a>
-- The &quot;We really can't handle these version numbers&quot; release</p>
<a name='Meanwhile, in perl6-language'></a><h1>Meanwhile, in perl6-language</h1>
<a name='Disposable optimization'></a><h2>Disposable optimization</h2>
<p>The increasingly poorly named &quot;Next Apocalypse&quot; thread went off into
discussing the possibilities of disposable optimizations that could
get thrown out when invariants that they depend on no longer
hold. This rapidly developed into serious blue sky stuff that I
can't help but think is a little premature. Fascinating certainly,
but I would like a working language before we got off making it do
all sorts of clever optimization stuff.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.LNX.4.44.0309150849030.3341-100000@redcap.sidhe.org' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Acknowledgements, Announcements, Apologies'></a><h1>Acknowledgements, Announcements, Apologies</h1>
<p>Sorry it's late.</p>
<p>I promised there will be new content at
<a href='http://www.bofh.org.uk:8080/' target='_blank'>www.bofh.org.uk</a> last week and, well, I put some photos
up. Maybe this week I'll actually write something.</p>
<p>As ever, if you've appreciated this summary, please consider one or
more of the following options:</p>
<ul>
<li><a name='Send money to the Perl Foundation at donate.perl-foundation.org/ and help support the ongoing development of Perl.'></a>Send money to the Perl Foundation at
<a href='http://donate.perl-foundation.org/' target='_blank'>donate.perl-foundation.org</a> and help support the ongoing
development of Perl.</li>
<li><a name='Get involved in the Perl 6 process. The mailing lists are open to all. dev.perl.org/perl6/ and www.parrotcode.org/ are good starting points with links to the appropriate mailing lists.'></a>Get involved in the Perl 6 process. The mailing lists are open  to
all. <a href='http://dev.perl.org/perl6/' target='_blank'>dev.perl.org</a> and <a href='http://www.parrotcode.org/' target='_blank'>www.parrotcode.org</a>
are good starting points with links to the appropriate mailing lists.</li>
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